This is a picture of my grandmother and two of her younger sisters. I estimate that it was taken around 1908 based on the ages of the girls. My great aunt, Alice, who was their baby sister, helped me identify the girls, and told me how her father insisted on his daughters wearing white frilly dresses.

The white frilly dresses with all those yards and yards of lace and ruffles, were made by hand by the girls mother, Bertha, and their grandmother, John Brown's daughter, Annie. My great grandfather, George Madison Cook, believed that little girls should always be clean and proper and dressed in white. It must have been very time consuming for Bertha to keep all of those frilly white dresses clean and pressed.

George and Bertha had a total of 9 children, five of which were girls. I can not imagine the amount of bleach that Bertha must have gone through over the years keeping all the dresses white.